completely agree. unfortunately dnsmasq, firewalls, running your own bind, or PF, table, or the other solutions you mention -- these all require a level of technical expertise far, far beyond the norm, or even 2 standard deviations above the norm of Internet users' technical ability (for some of them, including me). I had maintained the Facebook blocklist for hosts files because it was super simple for me to use, and to share with others.
definitely not ideal, not even complete, and requires work - BUT, nearly any Internet user can implement the solution done this way.
It would be really interesting to autogenerate the domain lists by running background scripts on AS numbers, polling DNS for every IP in the range, and cataloging the domains by script - say, daily, and then printing the list into a 0.0.0.0 prefixed hosts list. Thank you!
disclaimer: github user maintaining linked resource
Perhaps the selection bias is some combination of "understands how the Internet works / not willing to accept paid results in searches / looking for real facts and data" that lead users to use both Google and Stack Exchange?
Clearly Google has an obvious and overt lead in all categories, and all search. I'm not sure how you can refute that the set of visitors to one site is not a biased sample compared to all Internet users.
Your results are different than other published search engine use comparisons. If both are factual, then the measurements must come from different populations.
Just keep in mind: People who end up at Stack Overflow are heavily biased compared to the general Internet population - because they are looking for something that lead them to search for and then click a link to Stack Overflow.
This same bias that selects the population will affect the choice of which search engine to use.